Tuesday, January 26, 2010

I admit it - I tossed the question out onto Twitter in a bit of a lark. I was preparing for a presentation to 50+ of America's largest community foundations and I've been thinking about Apps quite a bit (not only because of the new Apple Tablet due out tomorrow) because I was about to declare Apps as Buzzword 2010.1.

Algorithmic review of the chances my proposal will meet the guidelines

Find the nearest program officer

Accept and immediately respond to micro proposals

Map projects in community (not grantees) and allow grants to them

Crowdsourced needs assessments and focus groups

Thanks to all of you who sent in ideas - I'll call you all out by name in next post. So, clearly I touched a nerve. Is anyone already doing this? Does The Extraordinaries want to set up a line of business building Apps for community foundations? (hint, hint). Can Community Foundations launch projects through The Extraordinaries? As usual, Beth Kanter has a great write up of "do good" apps and Britt Bravo provides another list.

So - what kind of apps would (will) your foundation build? What kind of apps would (will) your foundation use? And, enjoy, the first new buzzword of the new decade, Buzzword 2010.1 - Apps.

Please keep the ideas coming - comments or twitter (@p2173). By the time you read this post I will have shared the ones above with the foundations already. I'll check back in here to let you know how they responded.

(Sorry folks - The first version of this post (January 25) somehow got corrupted/encoded. Lots of email readers received empty emails and/or gibberish. Hope this one posts better. Thanks for your patience.)

I've written about the Nonprofit Mapping effort before and am thrilled to say they've launched their test version. Go to the site, check out the data, check out the rankings, comment on the methods, improve the data, use the data, and consider the implications. For all of us as donors to nonprofits. For all of us as taxpayers who pay for the data. For people who use, enjoy, benefit from the work that nonprofits do. For regulators and watchdog organizations. For those of us who run nonprofits. For public agencies that partner with them. For social businesses trying to get into these spaces.

Now, let me tell you a story. Last year, two large foundations and a municipal government got together to discuss the challenges that their shared community would face if lots of nonprofits went out of business in the down economy. They hired a consulting firm. They commissioned a study. They involved the community in the study (kudos!) They shared the study (Yay!) They acted on the study (what?) No really, they put money aside to help the nonprofits address the challenges that were identified. (Really.) And they are continuing to do so. This is a good news story. It is - in my opinion - a good example of institutions, public and philanthropic, working with the community to help improve it. In tough times.

Let me tell you another story. Last year several donors and activists were discussing news reports about the effects of the economy on nonprofits. They wondered if the news was as bad as it sounded, with lots of organizations going out business, people losing services, jobs being lost. They wondered what they, as donors and activists, could do about this. So they tried to get some data on nonprofits in their community. And what they got was out of date. They asked around. They called. They searched online. They came up mostly empty. They took matters into their own hands. They built a website and a network of volunteers who could were good at online research. They divided up tasks. They developed transparency metrics about data. They talked on Skype, coordinated via online documents and email, texted, revised, iterated. They looked for free tools where ever they could - free hosting, free document services, free data visualization tools. They benefited from flex time policies provided by some of their employers. They found comparable sites on other issues, followed the trends in Open Data and Government 2.o. They went to CityCamp. And they built this beta site of the Nonprofit Data Scorecard to show what data are available on nonprofits, engage others in improving the data sources, and encourage state governments to collect, share and open up these data in ways that were useful.

The second story is also a good one. It shows several new ways of getting things done, highlights the power of free, and demonstrates how some technology approaches totally shift the sense of scale - what started as a local question resulted in a nationally-focused, regionally specific tool. And the whole process was public and open, while being led by a small committed group.

Both approaches matter. Both accomplished good things. But one assumed data were the beginning, not the end. And one relied on the same public it was designed to serve to build it.

I hope the protagonists of both stories will focus on how they can help each other, each playing to their strengths and learning from each other going forward. The ways in which the Nonprofit Mapping effort came to be - its tools, techniques, focus, and execution - are useful for all of us to consider. This is not the way change used to come about. And the changes it may unleash are also new.

What do you think of Nonprofit Mapping's work? Their goals, approach, and findings so far? Please let them know - they're on Twitter and Facebook and have a blog open for comments. Let me know also, please.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Real(ish) time data sourcesPaypal has emerged as a new source of data on giving - reporting $1.5 million processed in donations to #Haiti relief efforts. As for data sources, Google Checkout, Convio, Network for Good and the mGive Foundation (behind the text donations) have definitely claimed their place as providers of real-time data about giving. The Foundation Center launched this online map of foundation grants to disaster relief, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy was updating its giving totals about twice a day Weds-Fri of last week.

Where we get our newsThe Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released some very interesting data on social networks, news sources, giving, and Haiti. The report is here. Their survey found that

"...18% report they or someone in their household made a donation to those affected by the earthquake, while another 30% say they plan to donate..... While 39% of those who gave made a donation in person, 23% gave on the internet and 14% gave via text message; by comparison, 12% gave by phone and just 5% made their donation through the mail."

I wish they'd asked how many people FIRST heard about the quake through email, twitter or social networks. My sense is that these media spread the word faster than ever before and that tens of millions of people knew about the quake within an hour of it happening and without ever turning on the radio or TV.

Who reads what?Stephanie Strom's NYT article about the blog Good Intentions are Not Enough also highlighted the role data are playing - as she showed how the blogger tracked readers from the White House and the State Department. Later on the same day that the Times piece ran, the blogger, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, announced via Twitter that more readers had come to her blog from another blog, Marginal Revolution, than had come from the Times story. I don't know if that will hold true over time, but it's an interesting tidbit about online readers, blogs, attention, and, yes, data.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Last weekend hundreds of volunteers got together in Silicon Valley, DC, London and several other cities for CrisisCamps: Haiti - tech oriented brainstorm/build sessions to develop tools that could help with the rescue, relief and recovery efforts. Similar efforts were coordinated by Ushahidi - an Africa-based, text-message driven platform that crowdsources disaster information. At the same time, the engineers behind The Extraordinaries worked to develop a photo-tagging tool that runs on people's smart phones, so anyone could donate a few minutes tagging photos that would be used to help find those missing in the disaster and reunite families.

By the end of the weekend, countless hours (or maybe they were counted - anyone have the data?) of expertise, coding, planning, and building had resulted in several functioning products, including:

A free, centralized text message number (4636) that would aggregate text messages coming from Haiti help with location data and facilitate the coordination of relief efforts;

Many more projects are continuing - you can find one list of them here (scroll down). All of these are examples of crowd-sourced tool development.

One of those (scheduled for launch on January 28) is called The Disaster Accountability Public Database and aims to "build an easy-to-search and easy-to-manage public reporting database to monitor activities of relief organizations soliciting donations for relief efforts and to inform the public on the effectiveness of aid efforts on the ground." It is being coordinated by the Disaster Accountability Project. This will aggregate information from individuals about the aid they observe being provided - are materials getting where they need to go, are aid organizations doing what they said they would, are there gaps that can be filled? This is crowd-sourced crisis monitoring.

It is helpful because it revolves around fundamentally different organizing principles than donating shoes or blankets or hard to move goods. Those efforts stem from the desire to help and the knowledge of what the donor has.

In contrast, the crowdsourced tech help efforts revolve around the desire to help and a willingness to listen to what is needed. Because the tools to be built are technology-based the goods to be moved are primarily information-based. Information moves differently than shoes or blankets or hard goods. This allows for a different design approach. For example, donating shoes means bringing something in to the disaster area - something that may or may not be useful by those it finally reaches. When the good you are trying to move is information-based, you can think about how it moves in and out of the disaster area - allowing you, for example, to focus on using text messages to locate areas of specific need.

Hundreds of millions of dollars, donated by individuals, foundations and corporations, will (we hope) go to good use in Haiti. Hundreds of millions, probably billions, more will come from governments around the world and will (we hope) help Haiti rebuild. And hundreds of hours of crowdsourced information-based tools will also help deliver, distribute and monitor that aid over time. As we think ahead to the next disaster we need to keep in mind that well-directed crowds are likely to be an important part of the relief infrastructure.

So today...when I was looking for other patterns this one occurred to me. The future of conferences is self organizing.

TED took the "unconference" thing out of the tech world and launched it into mainstream thinking through its TED x programs. Then the Sunlight Foundation launched hack-a-thons into the mainstream. Then everyone wanted to know how to use data for good. And now we have a conference format that is essentially a hybrid of "conference + unconference + camp."

It seems to go like this: claim a theme. Get some early supporters. Maybe one or two recognizable names to speak or say they are coming. Organize through social networks. Give folks a common focus - maps, hacks for Haiti, government 2.0, cool things you should know about - organize, reach out, curate good ideas and activists and - you have the future of conferences.

Just like on the read/write web, these face-to-face meetings rely on everyone acting as producer and consumer. Everyone puts in. Everyone who is going tells everyone they know that they are going and that is how the conference gets enough people to come.

This is an example of how online behaviors have changed our offline behaviors. The tools for spreading the word, getting input, handling registrations make it technically eas(ier) to plan an event this way. More important, the expectations about participating, sharing ideas, and producing and consuming seem to have leapt off the screen and onto the stage. What do you think - is this a trend, a fad, the future, or a hallucination on my part? And do you see other ways that online behaviors and expectations are changing conferences and how we organize ourselves offline? Please let me know.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

I've been writing all day but needed to take a break, to write, about new ways that technology is being deployed to help Haiti. This post will catalog some of the more distinctive tech + philanthropy responses that I've heard about or seen. These are limited to tech examples because tech is the driver of change in philanthropy I'm trying to understand. Offline, person-to-person, direct assistance, support and help are critical evidence of our humanity.

Please send me more examples.Email readers might want to check the blog directly as I hope to keep updating this post.

And, in what may be a first for transparency (or spin) in the nonprofit sector, Wyclef Jean responds to criticism of his YELE Foundation with a YouTube video. (This is here as a tech example, not as commentary on the Foundation or its management).

I've already written about text donations. Today Ushahidi announced a free text code (4636 (International:447624802524) for people in Haiti to use to text their location and their need.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Never before have people donated money to disaster relief at the scale and speed and ease that they did on Wednesday in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti. The reports I've seen show $7 million in text donations in 1 1/2 days. (updated: $12 million in texts, $150 million overall - from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, January 16, 2010) Tens of millions in "old fashioned" online giving. Twitter and Facebook as news sources for millions of people.

Not to be glib or uncaring - but we said the same thing after Katrina. And the Indonesian earthquake. Technology changes so quickly that we have almost entirely new platforms to deploy for each new disaster - so of course each one is the "biggest, fastest" example ever of using the platform of the moment. This time around its Twitter and Texting and social networks. Next time - and sadly there will be a next time - the platforms will be different but the story will be similar "The biggest, fastest use of X tool for giving. Ever."

What can we learn from this from the perspective of technology innovators? Philanthropy has always been a “long tail” market – the $300 billion that Americans give every year comes in millions of small gifts. In many ways, philanthropy is the perfect market for micropayments. Giving to Haiti disaster relief just proved this in a very visible way. I expect every online giving portal to soon offer mobile options, Google Checkout and Paypal and Causes will soon move to your phone, and Donate Now buttons will have text codes on them.

From the point of view of philanthropy and social investing, what can we learn? It may be too early to say - just because we can now give $5 from our mobiles, while walking down the street, doesn't mean I can think any faster than before. So I'm watching the numbers and the tweets and the online coverage and the emails and blogs and tv and trying to make sense of what's going on, all while grieving for the people directly affected.

Donor Attention Deficit Disorder

That people all over the world can be so instantly engaged and moved to donate is certainly a good thing. But does it come with costs?

On Wednesday, January 13, #Haiti was a trending topic on Twitter all day (a measure of what the millions of tweets are discussing). By Thursday, January 14, it was gone. Does the ability to give instantly and painlessly (mobile donors won't even see a charge for the gift until they get their next phone bill) make it extra easy to give and move on? Will "donor fatigue" be replaced by "donor A.D.D.?"

Real time data reporting

In addition to facilitating rapid giving, the text donation movement fundamentally altered the reporting game. Never before have we had hard numbers about how much individuals donated while the donations were still flooding in. All through the day on Wednesday January 13 you could watch almost real-time counts of giving - $800,000, then $1.2 million, then 2, 3, 4,5 million dollars donated to the American Red Cross.

This kind of data and reporting is unprecedented. It will - I hope - continue to move us toward better, more complete, faster data on all kinds of giving.

The power of social networks to spread the word and get the gifts flowing also works when it comes to holding the gift recipients accountable. Note that the tweet above is from the Red Cross - reporting out its receipts to its twitter followers.

New tools for accountability

Just as important was the way the users of twitter - who no doubt overlap quite heavily with those who donated via text - responded when they found out that the companies that facilitate text giving might take some of the funds for their own costs. That did not go over well - where the morning was full of tweets about how mobile companies were charging regular texting fees for donations, by the afternoon the "wires" were abuzz with announcements that all the major wireless carriers (AT & T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) were waiving those fees.

So can these tools also be used to 'watch' how the funds are used once the immediate rush of giving passes and the discussion inevitably turns to "what happened with the money?" Will Tweeters and texters change how those conversations and reports and accountability discussions play out?

Images and data

Of course, technology lets us do more than just give fast. It lets us see what is happening. Part of what moves people to give to disaster relief in other places are the heartwrenching images of devastation and pain. Which we can see on TV, on our computers, on our mobile phones. But we can also use these tools to transmit data that are themselves helpful. Within hours of the quake there were several open access data sites sharing street maps of Port-Au-Prince, Google made new satellite imagery available, and wikis were set up to help coordinate both recovery efforts and share information with, from and for those looking for loved ones.

As it happens I had just downloaded the Sunlight Foundation's Real Time Congress iPhone App the day the earthquake hit . Now I'm not a political junkie but this kind of data access is cool - real time information on hearings, commissions, votes scheduled from both the House and the Senate. What will I do with this information? Well, it gives me a whole new way to think about the news - I can easily now what to look for in tomorrow's paper, before it happens.

New behaviors and expectations

Having access to these data will change my behavior. Just as it changed when the same folks who instantly gave $5 by text stopped and asked themselves "Wait, is my money going to the aid organization or to the phone company?" That's the real power of the technology disruption - it doesn't matter if its online giving or texting - each iteration changes our expectations about speed and data and reporting and access and accountability. In turn we change our behaviors. And develop and deploy new technologies that then fit - and finesse - those behaviors again.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

(Scorecard from Game 3, 1955 World Series, Photo by Wallyg, Flickr, Creative Commons)

Nothing like the turn of a calendar page to get everyone focused on the new. But what really distinguished January 1, 2010 from December 31, 2009? Perhaps the new year/new decade is not much more than a trick of the calendar, the power of ever-present human hope for a better tomorrow, and a whole lot of marketing.

As I had said at the end of 2009 I wrote a paper in 1999 called Foundations for the Future (published by USC). In 2006 I had a chance to revisit it, and was asked to do so again on its 10th anniversary. Because of a calendar commitment I cannot personally join the USC Forum to discuss what has happened since 1999 - so I thought I'd do so here. That meant I had to review a few things, like The Foundations for the Future (FfF) paper, my book, and 1350+ blog postings.

New ways of organizing philanthropy that rely on information and technology.

The involvement of the financial services sector as vendor.

New access to information by the general public, nonprofits and change agents.

Demographics (especially an aging population, the role of women, and growth and political power of communities of color).

Global giving.

Leveraging other people's expertise.

Business models and a culture of entrepreneurship.

Changes in the public sector's funding practices and expectations of philanthropy.

How did I do?

Let's start with #2. Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund just finished the decade as the 3rd biggest fundraising nonprofit in the country. Financial service firms matter to philanthropy.

#3 - The information/technology landscape today is totally different than it was in 1999. Google. Twitter. iPhone. Remember newspapers?

#4 - Recent research on giving emphasizes the roles that women play. The Baby Boomers are now being described as makers of a "purpose bubble." We've got plenty of work yet to do toward eliminating structural racism. And the U.S. has an African American President. Demographics matter.

#7 - I think its fair to say American's were somewhat obsessed with entrepreneurship (social and otherwise) all decade. My newest indicator of a trend? When Malcolm Gladwell publishes a piece in The New Yorker to show its faults. See this article in January 18, 2010 issue.

#8 Public funding - The USA started the decade with a budget surplus. Not the case today - public funding for domestic programs has changed accordingly. The Obama administration's approach to funding domestic programs and social programs are their own twist on that of the Bush administration's. Health care reform (if passed) will shift this again.

So I did pretty well on seeing the drivers of change. But not so well on calling out the extent of their impact. As far as change in how philanthropy itself would operate (#1) the information foundations that I hypothesized about in 1999 barely exist today - most foundations today do not operate all that differently from the pre-Google, pre-mobile, pre-crowdsourced, pre-citizen journalism days. Ironically, re-reading the 1999 paper it becomes clear that everything I said might happen could have happened. And did happen - at the edges. Why they didn't happen universally - or even on a broad scale - is well worth thinking about.

Sure there are lots of great new funders and experiments. Prize competitions, online applications, videos, crowdsourced donor advised funds, online data markets, lots of giving circles. Leveraged giving and the use of other's expertise catapulted into common parlance when Warren Buffett put Bill and Melinda Gates in charge of his philanthropy - an idea predicated on the trends already visible in 1999. And foundations share a LOT more information than ever before (thanks to pdfs), more have websites, more have searchable grants databases, and a few hundred are on twitter - which, of course, was not possible (or probably even imaginable) in 1999.

Some important information tools (In 1999 I wrote "Guidestar...is working to provide online access to the financial records of all 501 c 3 corporations" - It had just launched) have become standard practice, and today new players are innovating off of those early pioneers. Many of the e-philanthropy sites (doesn't that term look quaint, now?) catalogued in the FfF don't exist any longer - in fact, many of them failed between the time the paper was written in the Fall of 1999 and when it was first discussed in January 2000. The same kind of snapshot of online philanthropy sites today generates an equal number and similar typology - but the names have changed. We're likely facing a similar "death rate" for these enterprises now as we did then. Lots of churn (which is good) and a few will stick.

Most important, the slow adaptation of technology to the core practices of foundation philanthropy is powerfully visible when re-reading the FfF paper now. This is part of the point that is made in my recently -released Disrupting Philanthropy (DP) paper. The adoption cycle for new technologies and behavioral changes in market or electoral driven organizations is far faster than for philanthropy. In fact, the adoption cycle for philanthropy - of real behavior changing tools - has been so slow we ought to be able to accurately predict what will happen when the tools do finally get used, because we have so much evidence from elsewhere. As the DP paper notes, the technology that matters in today's philanthropy is not the "new new" stuff but the "old new" (databases, websites) stuff - because that is what is widely used.

The disruptions noted in the DP paper are happening outside of - and all around - foundations. The cost of technological innovation is so low - and the access to mobile tools and on-demand data have become pervasive across cultures - that foundations aren't such powerful gatekeepers to these resources anymore. The entire knowledge/information ecosystem around foundations has changed. Where change comes from (B corp anyone?), how it is organized (flash mob, anyone?), how it is reported (tweeting the Prop 8 court case, anyone?), are all different. Whereas in 1999 foundations were a gatekeeper to resources for the technology to make change happen, their hold on that lock doesn't matter as much anymore. Access is available at much lower cost (when was the last time you paid Google for anything?) and the expectations are that data can and will be available.

Looking back at just foundations over the last ten years I'll say I was wrong about the timeline on which they would change - unless you focus on the exceptions that show what is possible (and not the thousands who look just like their brethren of 100 years ago). I was right about what was possible and many of the ways it would matter. This reminds me that I can look for patterns in the present and the past but then must factor in the innate irrationality of philanthropy when I project their impact.

2009 Predictions ReviewThis time last year I wasn't going too far out on any limbs (partly because I took January off after my mother died). Here's what I was planning to see in 2009:

Madoff scandal + Clinton nomination to Secretary of State would catalyze calls for greater scrutiny of nonprofits. I'd say "increased scrutiny" was a yes.

Calls for adjusting to a "new normal," more than a recession, new ways of doing business. I'd say we had a whole year of that - and may be more to come.

So my predictions for the year just gone by were at least half right (3 +4). More data needed to see how I did on numbers 1 and 2. My track record for the decade as a whole - I'd say the trends were right but I was overambitious on the extent of their reach. What do you think? Use the comments to tell me how you would score my work last decade.

Friday, January 08, 2010

I don't have time to do a full round up of conferences that matter before some of them actually happen. So, here's a quick, dirty and terriblyincomplete list of conversations I want to be part of virtually or in person. Please let me know what you're going to, what's new and must-attend, and whether or not you'll be live tweeting/blogging/video covering...I'll try for more info and more complete listing.

Email readers: Please check blog directly as the list keeps growing, and there are additions in the comments.

Addition: This is just through Q1 and Q2 - not yet thinking about the Fall.

Live tweets coming out of #CES from the FCC (live Friday Jan 8)#ces2fcc

About me

Why is this blog called Philanthropy 2173?

This is a blog about the future. The year 2173 seems sufficiently far enough in the future to give us some perspective. As sure as we are of ourselves now, talking about the future - and making philanthropic investments - requires that we keep a sense of modesty and humor about what we are doing. Philanthropy is for the long-term - for the year 2173.